


Lost in Translation

by Kymopoleia



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Gen, Trans Male Character, name does not become relevant for a while, unnecessary angst
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-06-22
Updated: 2016-08-10
Packaged: 2018-07-16 16:44:44
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 13,002
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7275943
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kymopoleia/pseuds/Kymopoleia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lance was so impulsive. He hadn’t even said what he wanted on the stupid moon. He just claimed that he wanted to see something, wanted to check something out, wanted this or that. But he never actually said anything specific, and that’s what’s killing Shiro. Had he been looking for something other than food goo and picked something nasty up? Had he been looking for some native species to hit on? Had he been wanting some fresh air? Shiro could wonder for hours, but when it came down to it he just didn’t know.</p><p>He lifts his head for a second and lets it thump back against the pillar, groaning.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> this probably won't be what you think it is and that's a good thing  
> thanks to cockabeetle for beta'ing and generally being there man

Shiro had known it was going to be a mistake the moment Lance’s eyes began sparkling. The boy had a habit, and Shiro didn’t know how to… to correct it, for lack of a better term. Lance was impulsive and good at begging, and Shiro never had the heart to say ‘no’ when he was on the receiving end of those puppy dog eyes.

This time, however, he should have figured some way out. Because now he’s standing, holding Lance’s jacket and feeling like the earth had fallen out from beneath him.

“What do you mean he’s still on the ship?” Hunk is asking Coran. “We’ve searched everywhere and he isn’t, you know, here.”

“Have we checked the medical pods?” Pidge pops up helpfully, but Allura cuts her off with a sharp “Thrice.”

Shiro had said he could go down to the moon they were orbiting for a few minutes, see if he found anything good, and when he’d come back up he’d looked a bit blue in the face and claimed he had a stomach ache. Next thing Shiro knew, it had been two days and Lance was nowhere. He was the last person to have seen Lance at all, and all he could offer was a lame ‘I told him to get some rest’. Whatever Lance had taken that to mean, wherever he’d gone, no one could find him.

His clothing was on the floor next to the hamper. His uniform was still hung where Coran had put it. His lion slippers and bathrobe were next to and on the bed respectively. Nothing was missing, no ships had been stolen, and his lion was safely slumbering, devoid of any lifeforms.

It just didn’t make sense.

Shiro swallows and crosses his arms, feeling useless. Because that’s what he was at the moment, he was useless. He’d been a poor leader, he’d been a horrible friend, and now Lance was gone because of it.

“I’m going to go check the ships again.” He announces, though no one looks at him beyond Pidge. “Maybe the scanners are malfunctioning.”

At that, Hunk makes eye contact, nods, and starts sending them all off in different directions. Keith is sent to the training room and anything between and beyond, Pidge to check each of the lion hangars, Allura to any nook and cranny she remembers but isn’t sure the others know about, and Hunk himself to the miscellaneous rooms and quarters that weren’t in the paths of the others.

Shiro battles his guilt as he heads down. His heart is pounding in his throat in fear of losing another teammate, another friend, another warrior against Zarkon. He hated to focus on the bigger picture like that, but that was what it came down to. There were seven of them against an empire that had been cultivated over ten thousand years, and if it was his fault that anyone else was lost… He wouldn’t know what to do with himself. It was beginning to seem that anytime he led someone, he ended up losing them. It had begun with the Holts, almost continued with Pidge, and had now stretched to Lance. Alright, so his track list wasn’t that long, and there was still a chance that they’d find the gangly teen, but he was still concerned.

His feet feel heavier with every step he takes, until he just stops, leaning on a pillar and just trying to breathe.

Shiro stays like that for a while, just breathing.

Lance was so impulsive. He hadn’t even said what he wanted on the stupid moon. He just claimed that he wanted to see something, wanted to check something out, wanted this or that. But he never actually said anything specific, and that’s what’s killing Shiro. Had he been looking for something other than food goo and picked something nasty up? Had he been looking for some native species to hit on? Had he been wanting some fresh air? Shiro could wonder for hours, but when it came down to it he just didn’t know.

He lifts his head for a second and lets it thump back against the pillar, groaning.

“That doesn’t sound like a head thump in the hangar.” He hears behind him, and a small smile twitches into place.

“Hey Pidge. No, it isn’t. And that doesn’t sound like you talking to your computer.” He pulls back slowly, turning so that his back is leaning against the pillar instead.

Pidge shrugs. “Well, it isn’t either. But I wanted to make sure you were okay, and the yellow lion is close anyways.” She offers a comforting smile. “It isn’t your fault, you know.”

Shiro shakes his head. “No, it is. Lance might be impulsive, but he stays if I ask him to.”

“Really?” Her eyebrows rise. “He isn’t that good at following orders.”

“He’s fine with simple ones.” Shiro jokes, shaking his head. “No, I told him to just go rest. I didn’t tell him to get some food, I didn’t tell him to get to the medical pods, I wasn’t specific enough. I don’t know what he took ‘resting’ as. I guess I thought he’d take a nap, take a shower, curl up in his lion, something. And now he’s missing and it is my fault.”

Pidge stepped forward. “Okay, reanalyze that statement. Do you seriously think Lance- our Lance, Cadet Sanchez and pilot of the blue lion, would have actually gone somewhere if you’d told him something specific? He’s stubborn, you know that. He’s a stubborn idiot and it’s just like him to go off somewhere and pop up a few days later, hair messy and jeans covered in grass stains, going on about whatever girl he met. It’s how he is, it isn’t your fault.”

“It’s still my job to know wh-“

“You’re our leader, not our babysitter.” Pidge cuts him off flatly.

“But he’s so young.” Shiro’s shoulders fall. “He’s only sixteen.”

“Yeah? So is Keith, but you don’t get too torn up when he goes off on his own.”

Shiro frowns, remembering Keith. They’d met back in school, and he’d helped Keith become a better pilot by giving him opportunities to train and hone his abilities. “That’s different, Keith can handle himself.”

Pidge scoffed at him. “Right, because that isn’t rude at all. What, are you going to try to say it’s different for me an Hunk too?”

“Hunk is nineteen and you are twenty-“

“Yes, and you’re only twenty-three.” Pidge raises her eyebrows. “Matt was only twenty-four. My dad? Are you going to keep trying to bring up age when you know it isn’t the real reason?”

Shiro presses his face into his hands. “I’m just looking for reasons to blame myself, okay? If you went missing it’d be my fault, if Allura…” He shook his head. “I don’t have to explain it, I don’t know if I want to.”

Pidge stares at him for a second. “Well, I’m going to check the lion bays now. You look for him, and if you figure out what your issue is, I’m just a com away.” She offers a smile and turns.

Shiro groaned as he went back to walking. He wasn’t far, but the hangar is one of his least favorite places in the castle.

Sometimes it was eerie, knowing how many people had lived and died in the castle before him. With ten thousand years separating the original Alteans and the current Voltron Alliance, he felt like there was a lot to live up to and too many footsteps to follow.

The hangar is huge and empty and he doesn’t know if they’ll ever be able to fill it again. ‘Back in the good days,’ was a common phrase from Coran, and every time he said it Shiro felt a spike of guilt for a situation that he’d had no connection to whatsoever. He could have done nothing for it, his family line hadn’t been anywhere near existing then. But he still feels a little indebted to this society, just like he’d felt indebted to the Balmera.

Okay, he was internally rambling. He missed Lance because Lance was always just off topic enough to keep him there, just enough out there to keep Shiro present. He balanced Shiro out and it was nice. It was comfortable, and Shiro could already feel the pit forming in his stomach over the current loss of his friend.

He…

Wasn’t in the hangar.

Not where Shiro could immediately see, anyways.

He starts to take the steps, counting them, taking inventory as he goes. After a few seconds he comes to a halt. Lance had been asking Pidge about his hologram trick not long before everything started, and maybe Pidge had come through, or Lance had stolen it, or something. Shiro didn’t know. He wanted to know, but he wasn’t good at knowing things. Despite being the leader, people did not seem to consult him on a lot of minor decisions that shouldn’t matter, but end up mattering anyways because the universe is practically owned by Zarkon and Zarkon’s life mission seemed to be ‘ruining everything for the New Black Paladin’, or, in lesser words, ‘ruining Shiro’s life’. That felt like a better way to phrase it.

But, if he remembered the technology and thought of it, that meant that Lance could be anywhere. He could have even sent the ship up without him, and used a hologram that way, or used holograms to make rooms look empty. The possibilities were endless and Shiro hated probably all of them.

But he steps into the small ship Lance had used anyways, noticing the messiness of it. The door had been left open when he checked it the day before, and since then the ship had descended into a pig sty. The food stores (only enough for a few weeks at most) had been entered and shredded, pieces of food scattered around. The thermal blankets had been shredded too and had been almost woven together with bits of plastic and wires to make what he wanted to call a rat’s nest on the floor.

Shiro groaned, hoping it hadn’t been Allura’s mice that had done it.

He steps gingerly around the mess to tap at the computer, it making small noises as it starts up. There is no sparking from inside, and a quick glance through the inside of the ship and the storage space proves that only spare wire had been destroyed to make the nest on the ground. When the ship has given no useful information and the pit grows heavier in his stomach, Shiro turns to the pile, eyes narrowing.

It’s moving slightly, so he assumes that whatever had made it was still there. It’s reassuring that he will find the cause, but then there’s a heaving of concern in his stomach. What if it was a space rat? He’d always heard stories around the Garrison about those, but he’d never believed it.

Shiro crouches down slowly, the fingers of his cybernetic arm touching the ground for balance. With his other hand he reaches out and rummages, wanting to feel the nest with his fingers. Just as he’s about to touch the center of it he pauses and switches hands, eyebrows furrowing at the small keening noise coming from the pile.

Finally, the last chunk of shredded blanket and plastic is dislodged and he pulls it back, revealing what immediately becomes a flurry of feathers and noise.


	2. Chapter 2

It’s a bird. It’s a bird that, after it flew at his face, hovered in front of him before gently lowering itself to his shoulder and not moving. Shiro can barely see it staring at him from the corner of his eye, and he has no idea how the hell to handle it.

It was a pretty bird, if he was being honest. Dark grey and black with yellow eyes, and a firm mottling of color going down. That being said, Shiro knew fuck-all about birds.

One time, when he’d been around seven, his mother and father had taken him to the zoo. When in the aviary, a worker had noticed the massive blue bird staring at him and had come over. She helped it, the ‘macaw’ she called it, crawl up onto her arm. From there she directed him to let the bird stare at his hand for a few seconds before rubbing and scratching its head. She admitted after a few seconds that the macaw was just lonely and wanted an itch scratched, but he’d gone starry eyed. He’d never gotten to interact with birds since, but when he thought hard enough he could just barely still feel the feathers under the pads of his fingers, feel the stare of the macaw deep into him, smell the aviary around him.

This was completely different but somehow struck the same chord deep in him. Shiro liked this little bird, this pretty bird, and he was a little scared of it, but he was willing to do whatever it wanted of him.

“Okay,” He whispers to himself. “If I touch you, will you hurt me?” He asks slowly, jokingly, doubting it will reply.

“ _No._ ” comes the hoarse sound, and Shiro almost doesn’t believe that it was from the dark gray beak.

He jumps. The bird startles, wings half-stretching with the shoulder-like joint hunching by the bird’s face as it squawks softly at him, eyes widening. He quickly relaxes and the bird settles again, still eyeing him distrustfully and digging its claws in but not attempting to leave.

“Sorry, sorry, wasn’t expecting you to talk.” Shiro replies calmly, not sure if it’s stupid to talk to the bird or not. “Can you understand everything I’m saying?” Maybe the question is too hopeful, but Shiro regularly piloted a giant lion mech and formed an even larger soldier that was going to fight a purple super strong paragon of doom. He’s willing to stretch his horizons a bit.

The bird cocks its head and squawks, then, after some stuttering, manages “ _Pretty bird._ ”

Shiro’s shoulders sag a bit in disappointment, but he lifts the human hand to gently hold it in front of the bird’s eyes for a second then lightly scratch its head. “Yeah, you are a pretty bird.” He coos back at it. “Good bird. What’s your name? Where are you from?”

The bird stays silent until he slowly stands, giving him this soft little confused chirping noise, as if it wanted to know where he was taking it or something. He noted that it didn’t try to leave him, so it didn’t seem to be very attached to anything in the pod.

The walk up to the kitchen is… weird. No one is in the halls, but while he’d have expected the bird to have done something, it stayed on his shoulder. It seemed to like him, or atleast want to stay with him. That was a good thing, he supposed, but it was still a little weird.

He runs into Allura first. She’d been crawling out of a pigeonhole, a little crack sandwiched between a pillar and the wall that somehow usually remained unnoticed most of the time. Her dress was a little dirty, and there was a piece of cobweb in her hair, but she looked fine otherwise. 

Shiro pauses, nodding to her. “Princess.”

She’s distractedly staring at his shoulder, and he reaches up to pat at the bird’s head. “Where did you get that?”

He shrugs. “I… I think Lance brought it up with him when he came back from the moon. It was in the ship he used…” He trails off as Allura’s intrigued and confused expression falls flat.

“I think I need to get back to looking for him, and you should do the same.” She replies tensely, turning on her heel.

Shiro knew the disappearance had hit too close to home for her, especially with the relatively recent process of grieving an entire race of people. Now they had a missing paladin and no idea where he’d went, and Shiro had appeared… with a bird. Nothing in the situation wasn’t stressful, other than perhaps the bird part. Allura had seemed interested prior to his mentioning of Lance.

“ _Pretty bird._ ” The bird squawks decisively, and Shiro snorts.

“No, that’s Princess Allura. She’s beautiful, but not a bird.” He replies, heading back on his way.

He'd expected some kind of reaction, and is surprised not to get one. The bird wasn’t very good at speaking, but then again, he supposed he wasn’t very good at speaking either. Shiro wasn’t the one who talked, Shiro tended to be the one who listened.

It’s about a day or so later when he runs into Pidge, who gives Shiro an odd look at the bird poised thoughtfully on his shoulder.

“Where’d that come from?” She asks, echoing Allura from the day before. If Shiro didn’t know better, he’d think the two of them were mind melded like Allura and the mice.

“It was in a ship. Hey, didn’t your brother keep birds?” Shiro asks. “He kept showing me pictures of them all through the Kerberos mission.”

Pidge smiles like the dork she is and nods excitedly. “Yeah. Looks like you’ve got an African grey on your shoulder. Except…” She holds out a finger for the bird, who Shiro had taken to calling ‘Birdie’, to climb on to. “Earth African greys have red tail-feathers. See here? This one has blue.”

Shiro blinks, reaching out to run a finger over them. “Huh. I hadn’t noticed. Allura didn’t say anything when she saw it, so maybe it’s a normal thing?”

Pidge snorts. “Alien grey parrot, now that’s something I’d keep in a cage.” She coos at the bird on her finger, who replied with a happy chirp. “Matt kept parakeets in one cage and a parrot in another, and he had the neighborhood owl nested in his room a week after it showed up. He always loved the sky. If he hadn’t gone to the Garrison he would have been a conventional pilot.” She shook her head. “Sometimes I wish he had just gone for the conventional, but I know he wouldn’t have been as happy there.”

Shiro reaches out and rests his hand on her should, squeezing gently. “It’s okay. He was happy, and we’ll find him again.”

Pidge pushes her glasses up with the hand not holding the bird, sighing. “It’s fine, I’m not going to focus on it. Now, let’s look at you.” She lifts the bird up and holds her other hand in front of its eyes before trailing it aside and offering belly scritches. “This is a… Okay, this is a female bird.”

Immediately, the bird squawks, sounding enraged, and flies up, moving to hover over Pidge’s computer and take a shit before it goes back to Shiro’s shoulder.

Shiro scoops the bird up and holds _it_ to his chest as he runs.

The first meetings with the rest of the team is much smoother. Coran offers the bird a slimy tuber and the bird eats it like it’s never seen food in its life. Hunk’s hair had entertained the bird endlessly, and Keith had almost stolen the bird on accident when he made coffee, which the bird seemed enthralled by.

Shiro greatly enjoyed the distraction. Anything that took his mind off of his failure with Lance was good, and the bird did a good job of that. And, beyond that, the bird was a fantastic companion. Shiro used an old cage- he had no idea what its original purpose had been, but he supposed he didn’t really want to know- and fixed it up with some dried corn-like-substance Hunk offered that he’d gotten from a moon, and a small bowl of water. Coran asked for some feathers, but Shiro felt bad the one time he attempted a plucking (it had ended with four long scratches down his shoulder) so he had waited until they fell off or were bitten off since.

He had never really kept pets before, and had definitely never gone for a bird, but he found a sense of comradery with this one. It was adorable. When he scratched the bird’s butt, its eyes half closed and its mouth opened, the grey tongue poking out happily. When he sang for it, it bounced to the tune and occasionally chirped at him happily. When the bird was about to sleep, it would coo one final _’pretty bird’_ at him before tucking the majority of its beak behind its wings.

Shiro found himself smiling more with the pet there. It killed him because he knew that Lance was still missing, that he could even be hurt, but the bird brought something out that he just found himself lighter for.

So maybe that’s why, when the next Galra fleet attacked, Allura went for Lance’s blue suit. ‘Just until we find him,’ she promised. Maybe that’s why they managed to win despite some hiccups. Maybe that’s why they were kind of okay.


	3. Chapter 3

Allura had been somewhat of a flower child when the opportunity arose. She enjoyed nature as much as her father, and they both liked to spend all day, from sunrise to long past when it set, in the fields. She’d been taught since a very young age that where there were plants, there were bugs. Where there were bugs, there were animals. Where there was animals, there was happiness.

The castle seemed much too cold and lonely without the terrain of Arus to bring fresh air and a sense of liveliness into it. Space was beautiful, and the different worlds were fun and interesting, but it was hard to compare against the real thing.

The mice felt it too. They chittered at her sometimes and curled in the folds of her dress, wishing they had fresh nuts and fruit to nibble on. All she ever had to offer was dried fruit from Altea, and while they appreciated the taste of home… it wasn’t the same, and she knew it.

The bird, while bittersweet with Lance’s disappearance, was the kind of fresh face she had missed. It was annoying to suddenly have an animal that she couldn’t speak to perfectly, but from the way it called _”Pretty bird”_ and _”No!”_ at her, it did have a clear understanding of her, if it’s own replies were a bit… if she were being unkind, she’d have to say ‘stunted’.

But the bird liked her dried fruit. She… Well, Allura would have to go with ‘it’, if Pidge’s accounts had any truth behind them. From Shiro’s giggles and the bird’s amused head bobbing, she’d have to go with ‘yes, it is true’. It liked her fruit, and didn’t mind the slight layer of dust. It liked the Altean nuts. When she’d offered some pressed flowers, the bird ate them too.

She found, like the rest of the team seemed to, that it was beyond fun to steal the bird away. Spending small moments with it, sitting in her room with the bag of dried snack mix on one side and an empty spool she’d snagged from Coran’s sewing basket, eased her mind as much as moments spent with her father’s memory had.

The bird, whom Shiro called ‘Birdie’, was a good listener. Its eyes followed her movements and it seemed to make small noises of agreement and disapproval at appropriate times when she spoke. If she hadn’t known any better, she’d have made an argument that the bird wasn’t just a bird, but an incredibly intelligent species that had inhabited the moon where Lance had… it hurt too much for her to think.

She had liked him. Despite his occasional moments of irreconcilable idiocy, he had likable traits. He was kind and thoughtful, and intensely aware of the value of life. Every time it came down to a decision of whether or not to save something, whether or not to follow through on something, he always voted for. It seemed that he had this loyalty to living, and he’d save as many people as possible so long as there was even a possibility of doing so.

Allura could see some of herself in him. Well- no, not in the dirty way, but she could see some of her own personality in his, and maybe that’s why she disliked it when he made sexual advances. It was funny but never something she was in the mood for. He was too similar to her.

Beyond that, though, he was a fun mix of patient and impatient. He’d get bored quickly when it came to things, but he never seemed to rush them either. He tried to busy himself when possible. He tried to find ways of entertainment in an admittedly boring castle.

She’d discovered him tinkering, once, with an old computer. Pidge had translated it, and Lance used some simple commands to make a game he told her was called ‘Frog’ or something along those lines. There were blips of obstacles on the screen, and the colored icon- he’d made it pink for her- had to move through them at just the right time to win. She’d laughed and compared it to their own battle against Zarkon’s empire, but he’d just rolled his eyes at her and gone back to working out a few kinks.

He wasn’t an idiot, as she’d initially thought. Each paladin of Voltron had attended the ‘Galaxy Garrison’ and taken the same classes, so it stood to reason that they’d retained some amount of information in each subject.

Pidge was incredibly advanced when it came to computers and programming. Hunk was better with… the physical aspect? He could build anything he set his mind to. And similarly with cooking, Hunk could cook the day away better than Coran ever could. On the flip side, Keith wasn’t very good with much of that, but he could fly brilliantly and fight even better. And on the other side of his coin, Lance wasn’t fantastic at any one thing, but he was good at a lot of little things. He could knit, if the few times she’d noticed him with needles poking just slightly out of his jacket’s inner pocket was something to go by. He could do the minor programming, like with the game, and he was adequate with his lion and getting better at flying it.

Shiro was… amazing at everything. If he wasn’t good at something, then he knew when to delegate, and he knew how to ask in just the way to get them to listen to him. It was comforting to know she had a good person to go to when it came to decisions, a second opinion other than Coran’s.

And, of course, Allura had spent hours going through each of these thoughts with the bird. She talked until the musical lilt in her voice gave way to funny pitches and tones, acting through each conversation with the bird as her captivated audience. Sometimes she would excuse herself to her closet and come out in old costumes and dance around, belting out old tunes at odd hours to amuse herself. With only Coran left of her race, it was hard to function sometimes. She missed having a good friend to speak to and to bounce ideas off of and make jokes at. What she’d hoped to find in Pidge, she found in the bird.

Hunk couldn’t help but find Pidge’s attitude about the bird hilarious. On one hand, the bird reminded her of her brother’s… Hunk would be kind and go for ‘collection’ as a descriptor. Seriously, who kept that many birds at one time? Crazy people, farmers, and zoos. On the other hand, the bird had been nothing but rude to her, and Hunk laughed despite his discomfort. Hunk, no no, Hunk wasn’t a big fan of things in the air. He liked fish, and he liked land animals, and he liked this bird only for the entertainment it brought everyone.

Seriously, where else could they find something that was willing to ‘dance’, as Allura and Shiro and Pidge insisted on calling it, for them? Where else would they find something willing to sneak off with people it liked less than Shiro at all hours and then mysteriously know exactly where to find him? Where else would they find something that was willing to risk the wrath of the… Hunk would safely say ’98 pounds soaking wet’ girl when it let one loose on her computer?

Well, Hunk supposed a cat could do all of those things too. Yeah, he wished Shiro- or, Lance? He guessed it had to have been Lance who brought the creature on board. He wished Lance had brought a cat on board. Hunk is almost positive he’s allergic to the bird, and that sucks when it perches on his shoulder and watched him cook, careful to keep its ass and any stray feathers from landing in the food- other than plates it mysteriously knew would end up in front of Keith, if the longer-haired paladins near constant disappointed look and consequential spitting-out of a wet, half chewed feather was anything to go by.

Okay, maybe that was funny. The bird was kind of cool, and when Hunk had held up a fist, the bird had lifted one foot awkwardly before just bumping its forehead and the top of its beak with his fist. He wouldn’t totally condemn anything with the balls- or, if Pidge knew what she was talking about, ovaries- necessary to fuck with Pidge.

Would anyone get upset with her if Pidge just killed the bird? Yes? Fuck.

Keith. Keith didn’t actually know there was a bird until a week and a half in, when he lifted his coffee to drink and gotten pecked angrily on the lip by the creature. It had squawked in warning once or twice before, when he’d lifted the cup, but that time it had been too preoccupied to make the noise at him.

Keith was oblivious when he was tired. He had been used to being alert for a long time, never sleeping and fighting for any scrap he got. In the Garrison he’d kept the defensive attitude and, as a result, lost his spot. After that he’d lived alone, squatting in an old shack in the desert and doing odd jobs in town for money for equipment and food.

Coffee had to be Keith’s favorite thing. Bitter but sweet, hot and delicious, the one commodity that he’d craved but never allowed himself to have. It took too much from his tight budget when he was alone, and then there had been no coffee beans in space.

But then Hunk jury rigged coffee and… it had been heaven.

And now, where Keith had only Lance to fight with, he now had a bird. A bird that didn’t have opposable thumbs, that couldn’t just get its own cup, that wasn’t allowed to have little dishes poured for it because ‘caffeine was bad for its heart’ and ‘it shouldn’t even be drinking what you give it- no, stop, KEITH’.

He’d never been fond of anyone telling him what to do.

So Keith would groggily wake, would shrug his jacket on over his shoulders but not putting his arms in it, and head out to the kitchen. The bird would already be waiting on the counter, staring at him with its head cocked, and the bird always got the first sip.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> i'm almost to where i want to be so this might kinda be rushed

Shiro grunted to himself as he arched his back higher, blinking furiously to try to keep the sweat out of his eyes. There’s a sharp line of metal digging into his back because he was too big for the hole he’d slid into, but Black had a short on one of her wires or something.

Lance had been gone for roughly a month. A month of fighting and searching and heartbroken silence, only broken through by the bird Shiro had found. The distraction was welcomed with warm arms, because even pidge recognized how helpful it was to occasionally think about things other than their missing friend. The worries about what he was up to, what had happened to him, where he was… it freaked Shiro out.

So he had split his time up evenly. Half searching restlessly, half amusing his bird. Sometimes his “amusing the bird” time bled into other things that didn’t fit into either category, like this.

Shiro gropes blindly for the wire strippers to get at one of the pairs, half of his sight going through Black and half through his own eye. It was a weird way to see the world, but it was easy enough to get used to the… suggestions. There were suggestions to adjust this or that wire, to fix this or that thing, to resolder this or that part. He wasn’t the best with the mechanics of ships, but he could solder with the best of them and follow orders when they were given to do what he didn’t understand.

He shifts again, trying to get the pressure off his back while he works, and his shoulder bumps into the harness the bird has perched on. There’s a loud squawk, and he reaches up distractedly to offer a gentle head scratch.

Lance… he wasn’t good at being on his own. Shiro had noticed that pretty quickly. It made him worry over where Lance was now. Had he been kidnapped and they just been unable to figure out how to contact his friends? Had he decided he was done dealing with them and left? Was he just hiding in the ship and playing some cruel joke on them? Was he hurt and trapped in the ship?

A loud screech interrupts his thought process. There’s a flurry of feathers and a loud noises, and he snaps his head toward the bird, startled, to try and figure out what the problem was.

Birdie was hanging upside down and flapping viciously, one leg pulled to its chest and the other tangled in the wire harness. Shiro didn’t know birds could look panicked, but this one looks downright terrified. He hurriedly rolls over, ignoring the pain in his back, and slides a hand under the bird’s back and uses his other hand to part the wires and free the leg.

The bird takes a few minutes to calm down, but when it does it presses its beak up to Shiro’s neck, its body as close to him as it can get.

Shiro coos softly and pets down the bird’s spine with his free hand, trying to show it that he won’t let it stay hurt. He won’t fail this bird like he’d failed Lance.

“ _Daddy._ ” The bird croaks, and Shiro freezes.

Then he lets out a startled laugh and goes back to scratching gently at the bird’s back. “Oh yeah?”

“ _Daddy. Pretty bird._ ” The bird pulls back and lets out a quiet chirp. “ _Daddy._ ”

Shiro snorts. “Okay, yes. Good bird. I’ll be your daddy.”

The bird squawks at him and headbutts his chin, but it’s too late. Shiro is chuckling. He’d somehow found a comfortable position inside the little tech part of Black, but more than that, he’s got a pretty bird, and he’s not thinking about his losses. He’d have to count that as a win.

“I miss him.” Keith admitted to the bird one morning, when it followed him back to his room.

It had been a good… month and a half, or so, since Lance had taken his little trip and consequently gone missing. Keith hadn’t kept track at first, hadn’t realized it was serious.

“At first I thought, hey, maybe it’s a joke.” Keith continues. “Maybe he took his stupid rivalry to another level, got everyone in on it. They’d direct me towards where he was hiding, maybe after letting me freak out, and laugh when I found him. Wouldn’t be the first time.” He sighs, looking down.

The bird coos at him softly. It’s on the desk, bent down in front of him with its butt in the air and his fingers scratching idly at the tailfeathers there. It had begun doing that after it realized he was willing to provide butt scratches, and Keith didn’t mind spending time doing that.

“But then he didn’t show up. There was no ‘jokes on you!’ from the team. There wasn’t a gag or a gimmick or some kind of ‘april fool’s’. Everyone else was freaking out and they missed him and they cried over him. I saw Allura once, sitting with a bottle and drinking. I asked her what it was and she gave me some and it tasted like alcohol from earth… but you wouldn’t know what that is, right?”

“ _Pretty bird!_ ” The bird replies, sounding offended. Keith sighs and blows air at the bird.

“Mm, that’s right. Pretty bird. You’re a pretty bird and you showed up out of nowhere because who knows why and you’re replacing him.”

The bird cocks its head at him.

“I wish I was mad at you.”

The bird coos softly and lifts its butt higher.

Keith shakes his head and scratches more. “I shouldn’t miss the guy, right? He was rude, he didn’t know when to stop, he never wanted to just cut me a break. I lost both my parents when I was eight, and had to work my ass off to get and stay in the Garrison, and then I ended up throwing it all away anyways and got kicked out. He wasn’t even the one who was my rival, I’d never met him before we saved Shiro!”

Keith shakes his head and smiles dreamily. “Charlena Sanchez, now that was one pretty bird. Lena, that was what we called her. She was mouthy and cocky and kind of a bad pilot, but she was better than anyone else and when we had to do the racing simulations… She’d always barely lose to me. It was a challenge, but my recklessness and her inability to work with a team made us almost equals. Well, I also couldn’t work with a team too well, but my recklessness probably had a firm hand in that anyways.”

He shook his head. “But I haven’t heard from Lena in a long time, and… I’m not sure I want to. She’s great, I had a crush on her for years, but if she really wanted to turn the rivalry into something else, she’d have figured it out.”

The bird squawks at him and snaps at his hand, and Keith pulls it back quickly, cursing under his breath.

“Hey, you’re supposed to listen, not to complain. I’ll talk about cute girls if I want to, okay? I don’t have to make sense when I talk.” Keith sucks on his finger before holding it out and letting the bird crawl up onto it. “The point about me bringing up Lena was that I know her. I had a real rivalry back in school. I didn’t know Lance, I don’t even know his last name! He kinda looks like her if you squint, but not really, you know? I mean, they’re both Hispanic and I’m not trying to be one of those guys…”

The bird stares at him, and he sighs. “I know, it’s lame. I keep trying to draw parallels between them, to compare them, and it’s… It isn’t fair to them. It isn’t their fault I like them both.”

The bird squawks in surprise and flaps its wings at him, and it manages a “ _No! No!_ ” between other stuff, like it’s trying to find the words but isn’t able to. Keith holds the bird away from him and shields his face, blushing.

“Chill! Chill! Chill, okay? You’re way overreacting to that.” He replies loudly. “I won’t give you any more coffee if you keep this up!”

The bird goes deathly still and Keith risks lowering the hand in front of his face. The bird’s eyes are wide, as if he’d just told it what he usually did to chicken.

“What gotten into you?” He asks, eyebrows up. “You’ve never met these people, it’s not like you know that they’re bad for me or something.”

The bird makes a soft noise at him and Keith narrows his eyes slowly. He thinks about it, and thinks about it, the seconds dragging by with every shift of the bird under his stare.

Just as he thinks he’s getting somewhere, the thought on the tip of his tongue and ready to spill out, the door behind him opens and Hunk’s voice comes through.

“Hey, do you have the bird? Shiro wants it.”

Keith glances between the bird and Hunk, concentration effectively broken. “What? Why does he want the bird?”

“Seriously?” Hunk steps in to offer a finger, and the bird crawls up onto it. “It is his pet, man. If there was a dog on here you know I’d be trying to keep it all to myself.”

“The bird chose to come to me.”

“You bribed it with coffee.” Hunk looked pointedly at the empty cup. “And Pidge said to stop giving the bird coffee because it was bad for the bird’s heart. If it gets too excited it could have a bird stroke and die. Do you want to kill Shiro’s pet?”

Keith stared at Hunk. “That sounds really, really stupid.”

“I’m taking the bird, man, I don’t make the rules. I don’t even like birds that much, you know?”

Keith sighs and lets his head hit the table. “I was in the middle of something with the bird!”

“Well, it can totally wait!”

“It has been two months since Lance’s disappearance.” Allura announces one day, when they’re all gathered together. They’d had a battle the day before, and while her tenure as the blue paladin was still… rocky, they made it out relatively unscathed. By ‘relatively unscathed’, of course, they really just meant ‘no one is dead, our friend is still missing, and the Galra don’t have him’ which had put all of them on edge.

Pidge is sitting on one of the counters, Hunk is sprawled tiredly over the couch and groaning. Coran is cooking, Keith is nursing a broken arm, and Shiro is sitting calmly with his bird. Allura stands in the middle of the room, still in her suit but her hair now down.

“We have searched everywhere we can think of. We’ve scoured every part of the castle and the surrounding system. We’ve been sitting ducks for so long that minor Galran ships believe they can defeat us in a fight, and they almost did.”

Pidge winces and Keith shifts, the sling obviously bothering him.

“I worry that we have been searching hard for nothing… if Lance does not want to be found, then there isn’t much we can do but to move on.”

Hunk sits up straight. “Are you trying to convince yourself that Lance would leave?”

Pidge slides off the counter. “No way, Lance would never abandon us.”

Coran pokes his head out of the kitchen. “He loved his family back on Earth, but he knew how far away it was and how important the mission of. Pidge or the red one are more likely to leave than Lance!”

“Keith.” ‘The red one’ repeats. “My name is Keith, Coran.”

“I know that, okay?” Coran swats at him with a dish towel, and Pidge looks over at Shiro.

“You don’t believe that he’d run away, do you?”

Hunk looks at the leader too. “Okay, I know sometimes he can be annoying… but he wouldn’t dump us like that. Lance is loyal. He loves us, he loves Blue, and he wouldn’t just disappear.”

Allura straightens her back. “It doesn’t matter if he would disappear or not, Hunk, the point of the matter is that we cannot look for him much longer! If we do, we could all die, and then he wouldn’t even have something to seek out if he decides to come back.”

“But he might not have ‘decided’ to leave.” Pidge uses her fingers as quotation marks. “What if he’s trapped somewhere, or a prisoner? That ship we ran into isn’t an accurate source of information!”

“Enough!” Shiro stands, the bird clinging to his shoulder. “He wouldn’t want us to argue!”

Everyone looks to him.

“That was what Lance did. He had his moments where his face would have looked better with a red handprint on it,” There’s a surprised chuckle from Pidge, and Allura covers her mouth to hide a smile. “But when we were arguing, really arguing, he was our conscience. He always wanted us to save people, and he always wanted us to do what was right. Our mission is to rescue the Galaxy from Zarkon and to protect our home, and Lance was able to look past his own interests and keep us on task.”

“Right, but what do we do?” Keith speaks up. “Do we look for him or not?”

Shiro tenses and looks away. “I… I don’t know.”

Hunk melts back into the couch and Pidge flops with him. Allura’s shoulders sag and Keith leans against the wall harder.

“I think he would have told us not to look for him.” Hunk offered slowly.

“He wouldn’t have wanted us to waste our time.” Pidge agreed, leaning on her larger friend and letting her head rest on his shoulder. “But we would look anyways because he’s a dork who gets himself into trouble when we don’t.”

“Remember those raiders?” Keith asked, a hint of a smile in his voice. “And how he got tied to a tree?”

Allura rolled her eyes. “He ended up laying in the dirt with his quiznak up for anything to come along and take advantage of.”

“Wait, is that what a quiznak is?” Pidge gasps. “I was wondering!”

Shiro rubbed his arms and turned his head to share a look with the bird. The bird is hiding its face in its feathers, almost as if it were trying to sleep but… something was off. It was upset. Shiro was too, but he didn’t want the bird to be subjected to something upsetting if it could be avoided.

“I lost him,” He speaks up again, drawing more attention. “So it’s my fault we haven’t found him.” He picks the bird up and holds it in front of his chest, petting it. “We… if we must give up, I’ll take responsibility for it.”

“Shiro…” Allura steps forwards, but he’s already turning.

“I’m going to my quarters, I think the bird needs something.” He calls over his shoulder. “And I might train after that, if you need me.”

He walks briskly, not leaving any room for argument. If there had been any to make, he might have even ignored them. He wasn’t in the mood to talk anymore, because the weight of having lost three team members now… It ached.

He drops the bird in its cage and covers the cage up to let it sleep for a while, and heads directly to the training room. He spends hours in there, working himself to the bone and sweating until he physically can’t hold onto things anymore. He lifts and pulls and jogs and crunches until he’s lying on a mat, groaning. He lifts himself off of it slowly when he’s done, takes a shower, and goes back to his room.

The workout hadn’t done much for him mentally, but physically it had gotten him exhausted enough that he might be able to get to sleep. He hadn’t really been able to do that much due to the nightmares and trauma from everything he’d been through.

Coming back to his room, he finds that the bird had gotten out of its cage and is nestled on the shelf next to his bed, sleeping fitfully with its feathers ruffled.

Shiro laughs to himself silently at how similar the bird is to him, the smile wide on his face at it. He couldn’t have picked something better, honestly. He strips out of his old clothing and replaces it with an altean shirt and pants, stretching and feeling the burn on his limbs. 

The bird is awake again and staring at him, beak half open and feathers slightly smoother.

“Hey, it’s just daddy.” He promises, offering a finger. “It’s okay Birdie.” He smiles sleepily. “Daddy’s gonna go to bed, okay?”

The bird makes a soft cooing noise at him then replies quietly. “ _Daddy._ ”

Shiro nods and leans down for a chaste, gentle kiss on the bird’s forehead before setting it back down and sliding into bed.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> this is terrible and took me forever to write because it is terrible and the dialogue is terrible and the jokes are?? why?? but read it anyways it's unnecessary angst

Not two seconds after he’s in bed, there’s a loud noise of something hitting the floor and Shiro sits up, startled.

He looks over to Birdie to see if something’s been knocked over and finds no bird in sight, but a naked Lance slouched on the floor by his bed.

Shiro screams, and it’s the shrillest noise he’s ever made.

He moves after a second though, to slide onto the floor too.

Lance is shivering and looking up at Shiro, his eyes wide and teeth chattering. Shiro isn’t entirely sure he’s actually real, but he still snags the blanket from his bed and wraps it around the naked shoulders. He’s trying not to look anywhere below the collarbone, so he makes sure the blanket covers everything.

“Lance?” He whispers, voice breaking a bit.

Lance nods and coughs, eyes half-shutting as Shiro’s hand lands on his forehead. “Y-yeah.”

“What happened? Where’d you come from?” Shiro shifts, pulling the teen into his lap. “Where- I- where did you go?”

Lance offers a wry smile and tucks his head under Shiro’s chin. “Pretty bird.”

“What?” Shiro blinks and glances around. “Birdie…” He pauses and flushes, suddenly understanding. “Oh my god.”

Lance laughs softly, tucking himself into a ball. “Yeah.”

“Can you say anything other than that?” Shiro asks, running his fingers through Lance’s hair. “I… really, where were you?”

Lance falls silent for a second, and he’s so awkward that it hurts. But then he coughs again and nods. “Yeah. I can, um.” He swallows. “Dry, it’s. Dry.”

It takes Shiro a few seconds to figure out what he means, but then he’s shifting Lance so he can grab a water bottle and offer it. “Sorry, here.”

Lance offers a smile before tipping the bottle up and drinking, and about then is when the door slams open.

“Shiro! Are you okay? These idiots ran into my room because they thou-“ Pidge trails off at the sight of the formerly missing blue paladin, and her hands fall from the doorframe to let Keith and Hunk into the room too.

“Shiro, did you…” Hunk steps forward even after he’s finished talking, eyes wide with shock.

Keith is the one who ends up finding the right words for the situation. He stares with the rest of them then finally asks, “Is he naked?”

Lance snorts and chokes on his water, shoulders shaking. Shiro hurriedly pats his back and shushes him, and it’s weird because Lance is hiding his face in the crook of his arm like he’s still got feathers there to hide behind.

“Yes, Keith, he’s naked.” Shiro lets out his trademark long-suffering sigh. “Can you try to focus on anything else?”

Keith flushes and Lance laughs, his face free but the rest of him even more firmly tucked into Shiro.

Pidge steps past Keith and Hunk to sink to the ground in front of her friend, and her eyes are brimming with tears. “Lance fucking Sanchez, if you being gone was a joke I will never forgive you.” She sniffs and reaches out to find his hand and squeeze it. “Where the hell were you?”

Lance breathes in, and his hand is shaking in hers. He looks between it and Shiro, and he looks as if he were still made of bird bones and feathers- fragile. He looks fragile and nervous.

Shiro shifts his grip to squeeze Pidge’s other hand and offer a smile. “He’s having some issues talking right now, give him time.”

She sucks in a breath and he can see how she squeezes Lance’s hand. “Fine. It… was it a joke? Where’d he come from?”

Shiro glanced over at the empty bird cage, and Hunk understood immediately.

“You’ve got to be kidding me.” He says, tone serious, then he shakes his head and laughs. “That is too good. Lance, buddy, five me.” He steps closer to offer a hand.

Lance steals his hand back from Pidge to return the five, grinning as well.

“What? Where was he?” Pidge looks accusingly up at Hunk, then back at Shiro. “Where?”

Lance clears his throat. “Nah, you’ll stab me.”

“I don’t have the stabby weapon here.” Pidge jokes. “But… maybe you can tell me after a visit to the medpod.”

Lance glances back at Shiro, but Shiro’s already standing, Lance still cradled in his arms. “You need it, Bir-“ He bites his tongue. “Lance.”

Pidge’s eyes widen. “Wait, excuse me?” She looks around them all, then suddenly, she gets it too. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”

Lance snuggles farther into Shiro. “Go away.”

She bites her lip, clearly getting her head straight again. “Sorry, Lance, I’m just.” She reaches forward and he shies back. “I’m just glad you’re here.”

Lance spends about three hours in the medpod. It takes about two hours, thirty eight minutes, and many headaches to explain what’d happened to Keith.

“Okay, but like, that doesn’t make sense.” Keith says fifty-three minutes after hour two mark. “How did he turn into a space parrot? Why was he gray, not like, brown?”

“Wow, racist much?” Hunk comments from where he’s fiddling with some contraption he and Pidge had been working on, eyebrows raised and lips quirked up, amused at the poor word choice.

“What? No- I meant his hair, his hair is brown.”

“He was clearly modeled after a Timneh African grey parrot, Keith.” Pidge speaks up from where she’s watching Hunk, rolling her eyes as if it were common knowledge and not born of Matt’s bird-obsession. “They, as a species, have grey and white feathers and darker tailfeathers. The feathers are usually red, but the special blue feathers were kind of an obvious tip off. I’m sure if you’d been turned into the bird, your feathers would have been red, and I wouldn’t have been able to tell the difference.” She teases the last part.

“But how did he turn into a bird? I know I didn’t exactly do well at the science classes and stuff, but like, isn’t there a mass issue? Birdie was bird sized, Lance is human sized. That doesn’t work, does it?” Keith had shrugged his jacket off about half an hour before, and had taken to pacing, and is starting to look very erratic. “So he can’t have actually been the bird. Maybe we didn’t check everywhere?”

“Well, you’re forgetting magic, lad.” Coran pointed out, stepping back away from the medpod after checking on Lance’s information. “The Galra have forces at their disposal that we can’t even begin to understand, and all we can do is try to understand it as they throw it at us.”

Keith groans and presses the heels of his hands to his eyes. “And we wonder why we’re so outnumbered and why we always barely get out of there. We’re outmatched.”

Allura comes in behind him, patting his shoulder. He notices that she’s back in her old blue and pink uniform, and realizes that she must have been itching to get back to her old position after the friction between her and the lion she’d been piloting for the past two months. “We are only as hopeless as our parts, Keith, you can’t just look at it one way without considering everything else. Yes we are outnumbered and in the dark when it comes to what we’re facing, but that doesn’t mean we do not have a chance.”

Keith moves his hands and stares at her flatly. “If they can destabilize our whole team by doing some magician’s hat trick to make an entire person useless, then what do we do next time they decide to do something like this? Sit on our hands and freak out the whole time again?”

“Did you forget that Lance is actually a human again? We don’t know how their magic works or what it’s capable of, but there has to be some kind of limitation or time limit on it.” Pidge pipes up again. “We can beat them, we just have to figure them out.”

“And we will.” Allura interrupts whatever Keith had been preparing to say. “We will figure out all of their new tricks and we will take back the universe.”

“Wow, nice pep talk.”

There’s a beat before everyone turns to see Lance leaning on the medpod, one hand holding it tightly and his head cocked, almost leaning on his arm but not quite.

It’s a scramble, but then Hunk is lifting Lance in a crushing hug, Pidge sliding just barely under his arm to latch onto Lance’s side, and Coran rushing forward to press a hand to Lance’s forehead. Allura puts a hand on Hunk’s arm and Keith hovers, but everyone’s attention is fixated firmly on Lance.

“Hey- hey- okay down down down- I’ve been eating coffee and corn for two months-“ Lance gasps out, patting Hunk’s shoulder and wiggling in his grip, obviously needing room to stand on his own.

Hunk sets him down and ruffles his hair affectionately, letting the others get to him.

Allura quickly takes the vacancy to hug Lance, and when she’s done Keith steps forward for a hug before a surprised look from Lance stops him. Then Lance takes the initiative and hugs him, and then everyone is done with the ‘wow, so happy to see you’ stuff and let Coran check him over.

“What happened to you?” Hunk asks.

“Where’s Shiro?” Lance counters.

“Sleeping, he needed the rest.” Coran replies as he lifts Lance’s arm, scanning him with some bit of Altean tech that he hadn’t gotten around to explaining yet.

Lance looks almost disappointed, but then he shakes his head. “Okay, yeah. I wanted to get some fresh air and there was this uninhabited moon, so I went down and walked around for, like, maybe an hour?”

“Why didn’t you take your lion?” Allura asks, interrupting.

“I thought it would be kinda conspicuous. Last time I had my lion on a moon I got tied to a tree.”

“And this time you got turned into a bird.” Keith supplies. “Maybe you should stay away from moons?”

“And maybe you should stay away from interrupting?” Lance replies, half smiling but looking very annoyed.

“Maybe you should-“

Hunk puts a hand on Keith’s shoulder warningly. “Maybe you should calm down.”

Keith bristles, but a cold hand pressing to his lower back, below where his jacket usually lies, stops him. He turns his head to glance and see who it is, and sees Shiro, hair still how they’d last seen it and ever-present gentle smile in place. Keith lets out a huff of air he hadn’t known he was holding and relaxes, letting his shoulders loosen and his fists unclench.

“Lance, will you finish the story?” Shiro asks, calmly, and Lance nods, crossing his arms as Coran starts doing some scans around his stomach.

“Fine. I walked around for a while and didn’t really do anything, but then I saw a,” He trails off for a second, tongue between his teeth and eyebrows raised. “I don’t know what it was.”

“Did you touch it?” Pidge asks, immediately, like a horrible friend.

“What? No- yes.”

“Called it.” Pidge opens her hand, and Hunk obediently drops a handful of shells they’d picked up from an aquatic planet into her palm. “Cha-ching.”

Lance rolls his eyes and shifts how he’s standing, crossing his arms. “Anyways, it was the weirdest thing. About hip height, glowing, and making this high pitched humming noise. Even when I tried to walk away it just got louder and louder, until I circled back to it. I noticed that when I got closer it sort of opened up.”

“Please don’t be Daphne from the first Scooby Doo movie.” Pidge says hopefully, playing with one of the shells.

“I was Daphne from the first Scooby Doo movie.” Lance confirms.

“Dammit.” Pidge hands all of the shells but the one she’d been playing with back to Hunk, who just silently puts them back in his pocket.

“Seriously dude? I could’ve been Shaggy.”

“You’re Daphne, bro, accept your fate.”

Lance pouts at Hunk’s unforgiving shrug but starts talking again anyways. “I didn’t mean to touch the thing. It had symbols all over the surface, and they kind of looked like what we see when we try to hack the Galra.”

There’s a collective groan and Coran is the one to voice their concerns. “You touched something that had Galran symbols on it?”

"Not intentionally. It was, like, a brush of my fingers when I was looking at it.”

“Why must you look with your hands, Lance?” Pidge shakes her head at him. “Ninety percent of your problems are from that.”

“It’s a habit, okay? Anyways, it shocked me, I pulled my hand back and hauled ass, and then I started feeling sick. Shiro told me to get some rest so I went in to go take a nap, and after that it was a blur. Then I woke up as a bird.”

“Okay, but how did you know you were a bird?” Keith pipes up.

“I had wings and when I looked at myself I was grey? And it took a bit to figure it out- even longer to get out of my room- but I made it back to the ship because I remembered there was some food and stuff there and I was starving.”

“So some Galra device that you accidentally touched but didn’t understand turned you into a bird.”

“Yes.”

Keith throws his hands up and walks away. “That’s it, I’m done for today. Talk to me tomorrow.”

Lance opens his mouth to say something, but Hunk pulls him back into another hug. “Hey, calm down man. Give him time. You were gone a long time, you know that.”

Lance deflates against him, leaning and letting his eyes close. “I wasn’ gone. I was a bird. It was frustrating.”

“You took a shit on my computer.”

“You called me a girl.”

Pidge pauses, then remembers the moment and breathes in. “Shit- I- Lance.”

Lance presses his face further into Hunk’s chest, just letting his friend pet him. After a few seconds, though, he pulls back and sighs. “I’m gonna- I need to get real clothes on. Okay?”

“Yeah buddy, your room’s how you left it.” Hunk lets go slowly, pointedly not looking over how ill-fitting the altean almost-hospital-gown is on the blue paladin. 

Lance crosses his arms to rub at his arms, turning and heading for the door. As they watch, they can see how it’s awkward for him to put his feet down and that, worse, he’s having trouble walking without stumbling and pitching forward.

Shiro remembers how Birdie used to its- his, Birdie was Lance- his beak to move, and he ends up stepping forwards, putting a hand on Lance’s lower back and helping him even out.

Lance glances up at him through his lashes almost owlishly, then looks back forward. He waits until they’re out of the medical bay to speak. “Thanks.”

“You’re welcome.”

“You were being quiet in there.”

“I was giving you room to talk.”

“Okay.” Lance rolls his eyes. “You could have piped up. That didn’t hold anyone else back.”

“Maybe I wanted to hear you talk. It’s been a long time.”

“And they’re all mad at me and yelling at me anyways, that doesn’t really mean anything.”

“They were scared they’d never see you again.”

“I was there, you know that right? I was there and I didn’t forget anything.”

Shiro’s face falls and his heart flutters nervously, his mouth opening but nothing coming out. “I know.”

“I’m sorry, Shiro, I’m just… I’ll talk to you tomorrow, and maybe then I’ll be in a better mood.”

Shiro nods, letting Lance open up his room. Before the door closes though, he puts his foot down and holds it. “Hey, why did you only say that handful of words?”

“They were the only things I could figure out how to say.” Lance pauses, then gives Shiro a shit-eating grin. “Right, daddy?”

Shiro’s face goes red. “If I’d known it was you I wouldn’t have called myself that.”

Lance gives him a fake pout and edges Shiro’s foot out of the door with his own, letting the door close.

Then he goes through his beauty routine and lays down, feeling off and like his skin is too tight. He wouldn’t admit it, but after tossing and turning and ruining his face mask, he kind of missed having feathers.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> are y'all happy


	6. Chapter 6

Keith wasn’t actually expecting Lance to find him the next day. He was expecting to train for a few hours, eat lunch, drink a lot of water, take a shower, pass out, then maybe lament to Shiro about how awkward the situation was and how upset he was at himself for verbally attacking Lance the day before. They’d just gotten him back, but here Keith was, picking fights like Lance hadn’t been gone at all. It felt ridiculous.

But then there’s a knock on his door, early, long before he’d have usually gotten up. Keith isn’t even dressed yet, just in his cargo pants and socks, the blanket pulled around his shoulders like a cape and dragging on the floor. He opens the door and expects some kind of emergency, blinking the tired from his eyes and not sure what to expect.

But his breath is taken away because it’s _Lance_.

Lance’s face is freshly scrubbed and his hair is still a mess, but his skin still looks like it’s sparkling in the dim mid-morning glow of the lights in Keith’s room. His old blue shirt is on with the sleeves rucked up over his elbows, a pair of loose Altean pajama bottoms low on his hips and dragging the hems over the ground. Keith opens his mouth to chastise Lance, tell him that he’s going to ruin the pants, but then the door is shutting and Lance is maneuvering him to push him against it and then-

Lance is kissing him.

It’s quick, just a close-lipped mash of their faces together, and Keith doesn’t have the time to recognize that it’s happening before it’s over, and Lance is staring at him, looking like hell at its hottest and most humid as he starts sniffling.

“Keith, you’re such an idiot.”

It takes another few seconds to make Keith’s mouth work, and then his eyebrows are furrowing and he’s pushing Lance off of him. “What the hell? Why are you- what-“ Keith’s voice fails him and his throat closes up, remembering again how much he’d told the stupid bird. Why had he felt the need to open up? It was just a bird, it wasn’t going to bring his friend back to him.

“If you’re just going to throw it in my face, I don’t want you in my room.” Keith swallows, bracing himself. “Okay?”

Lance shakes his head, turning and going to sit on Keith’s bed with all the grace of an adolescent giraffe. “Consider your face a no-ball zone.” He pauses, realizing what he said, and snorts in surprise. “I’m not here to fight, he-who-owns-a-mullet.”

“Are you seriously going to say you’re not here to fight then compare me to Voldemort?” Keith lets himself wander towards the bed, wondering what the hell is going on.

“Mm, yeah.” Lance shifts to make more room on the bed, ending up with his legs stretch up the wall and his ass alarmingly close to Keith’s pillow, his eyes roaming the ceiling over the bed. “But sit down, dude. Okay? We need to have a talk.”

“Are you going to turn me down?” Keith asks, lowering himself to the bed and bundling the blanket up around himself. “Or are you going to make fun of me for stumbling over my words or are you going to be mad at me for yelling last night or confessing while you were a bird-“

“Okay, shut up, seriously. The ‘we’ implied me getting a chance to speak too, my guy.”

Keith takes a deep breath and nods. “Okay, fine.”

“Do you remember Lena Sanchez?”

Keith blinks at the question, but shrugs. “Yeah, of course I do. She was an okay cargo pilot. She wanted to be a fighter pilot but I kept winning.”

“You totally cheated. That isn’t the point, but you _totally_ cheated.”

“I did not cheat! I just knew how to do it better than her.”

Lance tilts his head to look at Keith, his expression unreadable. “You had a crush on… on her, right?”

Keith nods, suddenly glad for the blanket he’s burrito’d himself in. “Yeah. She’s amazing, I wish I’d gotten her number or something.”

Lance snorted and shook his head, closing his eyes. “And what if I told you that she’d liked you back?”

“I’d say it doesn’t really matter because we’re in space and she’s back on earth.” Keith shrugs. “It isn’t like we’re going back anytime soon.”

“And if I said she was on the ship?”

Keith blinked. “She isn’t?”

“Dude, my guy, Keith, buddy.” Lance replies, pulling his legs to his chest and turning so that he was on his side. “But what if she technically was, and she wasn’t the same as you remembered her but she liked you too?”

Keith was starting to get kind of uncomfortable. “I don’t know? I guess I’d be kind of excited. But she isn’t, Lance, and you know that.”

“Dude. I’m trying to say something here, and it would be super great if you didn’t keep interrupting.”

Keith sighs and leans against the wall. “Fine.”

“So, if she was here, you’d be excited. Yeah. That’s good. And what if she were here but she wasn’t really, you know, a girl anymore. What if she was a guy.”

“I don’t know? I don’t really care about that. I like guys more, she was more of an exception than a rule.”

Lance sighs, then rolls his eyes. “Okay. What if I were Lena?”

Keith pauses, and groans, freeing his hands to press the heels of them to his eyes. It makes sense. “Oh my god, Lance. Did you have to take me on that trainwreck? Couldn’t you have been more direct? For once in your life?”

Lance sits up and turns, still looking defensive and small and tired. “Dude, for the past two months I only managed to say four words. I miss talking.”

Keith unbundles himself from the blanket and slides forward, cupping Lance’s cheeks and kneeling, towering over him for once. Lance doesn’t say anything, but his eyes are shining with nervous apprehension and his lips are parted. He’s waiting for Keith to say something, but Keith doesn’t have plans to do that, not for a little bit. He shifts and straddles Lance, settling into his lap easily.

And Keith kisses him.

It takes a beat for Lance to react, but then one hand is sliding around Keith’s waist and the other resting on his arm, and this time the kiss isn’t quick. It isn’t chaste or slow or closed lips, it’s open and gross and long and nice. Keith lets one hand slip back to Lance’s hair to tug on it and uses the other to slip under the collar of Lance’s shirt, rubbing warm circles into the chilly skin and let his nails catch when they can, leaving the tiniest little scratches that somehow make him feel like he’s marking Lance as his.

It gets better when Lance pulls them so that they’re laying down, Lance’s hand cupping Keith’s ass and Keith’s hand knotted in his shirt, all of their feelings pouring out without the hassle of struggling to find the words.

But then Lance pulls back, breathing hard and hiccupping a little and letting his hands slide off. “Hey, t-time out.” He whispers, and Keith nods, sliding to curl into Lance’s side.

“What are we doing, Keith?”

“Um, making out?”

“Yeah, but like, you’re shirtless.”

“And you’re observant.”

“I want to talk about stuff.”

“I’ve never been good at talking.”

“Then maybe we can try…”

Keith sighs and cranes his neck to look at Lance, one hand resting on his chest and feeling the muscle and bone beneath. “Would it make you feel better for us to talk?”

“Yeah.”

Keith nods once, slowly. “Then maybe we can talk.”

Pidge is pretty sure Lance wasn’t looking for her. He just happened to walk into the room, see her sitting on the couch, and decide to maybe sit down. It was all a coincidence.

“Hey, what’s up?”

That would be a coincidence too.

“Not much, you?” She doesn’t take her eyes off of the computer screen, though the hair in her eyes is starting to get annoying. She misses back when the haircut was fresh, nothing in her way.

“I talked to Keith this morning.”

“You two? Talking? Wow, everything really has changed.”

Lance snorts, and Pidge glances at him finally, fingers hovering over the keyboard.

He looks like a mess. But a good mess. His hair is messy, his eyes bright, and a lazy smile on his face. His shirt is wrinkly and he has a bruise on his neck-

“Woah!” Pidge sets the laptop down and turns, pointing. “What is that?”

Lance blinks and pulls a hand up to cover the bruise. “What? Nothing.”

“Is that like a ‘I’m an idiot and I hurt myself’ bruise or a _hickey_?”

“Cease, child, cover your virginal ears!” Lance drapes an arm over his face dramatically and leans back, kicking a leg over the back of the couch. “You can’t know!”

“Lance!” She yells, climbing over him to grab his arm. “Oh my god, I’m older than you!”

Lance stops moving when she’s on his chest and trying to pry his arm off, grinning. “I know.”

Pidge frowns at him. “I don’t like that look on your face, Lance.”

He moves his hands slowly and lays them on his chest, not much farther up than where she is. She scooches back and he huffs, puffing his his chest up. “Hey, shortstack, you’re pretty heavy.”

Pidge rolls her eyes. “I’m not _that_ bad.”

He raises his eyebrows and lifts a hand to squish her sides. “It’s a good thing.”

She bats at his hand, moving to get off of his lap. “Don’t touch me if you’re going to call me fat.”

“I’m not calling you fat! You were like, eighty-seven pounds soaking wet before. Now you feel like a real human-sized person.” He booped her nose as he sat up. 

Pidge rolled her eyes and turned away from him. “Fine, sure. Whatever you want to tell yourself.” 

He leans onto her and presses his chin into the line of her shoulder, breathing through his nose and sending chills down her spine. She pulls the laptop back and lets him rearrange her, bracketing her legs with his thighs and sliding his arms around her waist comfortably. He was almost like a super clingy beanbag chair, solid in all the right places and comfortable, though admittedly a bit bonier.

She sighs. “Do you want to talk or should I apologize first?”

Lance hums. “I’ve never heard you apologize for anything before.”

Pidge snorts and shifts, tapping the backspace key a couple times to get rid of some keysmash she hadn’t meant to include. “I don’t usually apologize for things. And I didn’t technically do anything wrong, I just kind of. Misgendered a bird. Sort of.”

“I’m not actually upset about that, you know.”

“Good, because I’d be kind of upset if you were. I understand, but it would be a ‘what the fuck’ kind of thing.”

Lance nods, and Pidge feels his breath again, feels the cold tip of his nose through her sweater.

“But I am sorry. I’m sorry you got turned into a bird, I’m sorry you were Daphne from the first Scooby Doo movie-“

“I’m Shaggy.”

“And I’m sorry that we didn’t figure it out until you were back to normal. And next time,” She pinches his hand. “Don’t be Daphne! Don’t touch the alien thing in the middle of nowhere when you’re all alone and don’t even have your lion. No touching.”

“I was looking at it!”

“Looking happens through the eyes, Sanchez.” Pidge rolls her eyes and leans back a bit. “But you’re back. Good. I was worried.”

“Did you think that you weren’t going to get me back either?”

She stiffens, suddenly feeling like his sprawling limbs were too much, and pulls out of his grip to lean against the opposite side of the couch and let the side of it press into her back, hard and comforting and less like him. “I’m going to get them back.”

“I know you are, I know we’re going to find them, but sometimes you have to worry you aren’t going to.”

“Lance…” Pidge looks away. “They’re out there, and I’m going to. I have to. They’d do the same for me.”

“I’m not saying they wouldn’t or that you aren’t, I’m just saying you worry you can’t.” He scoots forward, and sometimes Pidge hates how much of him there is and how much _more_ he is. She’s tiny and smart, and he’s big and full of heart. And for a while he was tiny and she never put it together.

Pidge leans forward and hugs him, pressing her face into his chest. “I missed you, you fucking giant dork.”

He snorts and pulls her back in. “I missed you too.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ngl i'm kind of getting tired of this fic  
> i love it and its premise but i'm a balloon that's lost its air on this one  
> probably going to get it to the shippy parts then let it die

**Author's Note:**

> _this has been added as of 8/11 but_   
>  _no the trans tag is not for pidge, pidge is a girl and pidge uses she/her pronouns_   
>  _do y'all think i'm transphobic or something?? or that there'd be a magic coming out scene??_


End file.
